Links

With all this snooping and overreaching data-collecting Google and everyone else is doing on the web, everywhere, I feel less and less comfortable just browsing random websites with each day. I've found some tools that help you protect your privacy while just going about your regular business online - searching for information, checking e-mails, browsing books on Amazon, etc.

Disconnect

Disconnect - I came across this on Wired's website. It "lets you visualize and block the invisible websites that track you" (from their own website). It's available as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

There's a Disconnect Search extension too, but in my testing it had some flaws. The first was that after searching for something on Bing, when I tried to go to page 2 of the results it wouldn't let me. Page 1 of the results would just reload! The second major problem I came across was that when I tried to run a new search from the search bar on the Bing search results page, I was redirected to the Disconnect website, instead of results for my new search!

SRWare Iron

Iron has been my go-to browser (and Chrome substitute) for years now. It's basically a snoop-free version of Google's Chrome. They've taken out all of Google's code that tracks your activities and habits, while leaving you able to use all the Chrome extensions and features you like and use. It's a good product.

Tor Browser

By now I think Tor is pretty popular among advanced computer users. It's a nice package that lets you surf the web through proxies all over the world. The Tor Browser Bundle comes with everything you need to get started, including Firefox as the default browser. After installing you run it and Firefox starts with Tor enabled, and you go about your business. You won't be able to view videos and some JavaScript functionality won't work like you're used to, but that's the price you pay for higher privacy.

ChrisPC Free Anonymous Proxy

ChrisPC Free Anonymous Proxy is similar to Tor but it's slightly more user-friendly. You install it and it configures your current browser(s) to tunnel their traffic through its proxy connection. What I do is use this with my regular Firefox installation for anonymous browsing that doesn't require logging in anywhere - doing research online, or reading something. For other tasks like banking and tasks that require logging in, I just use my SRWare Iron browser (or Maxthon, which I also like).

"Contacts Git" - name of the project you want to delete. (I've already deleted this particular project from my account which is why it's not showing up in the screenshot.)

Below is what the whole transaction looks like in the DOS Command Prompt (cmd.exe). Note the path to the TfsDeleteProject executable in the prompt, which in my case is c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE but could be different for you.

If your Vizio laptop running Windows 8 keeps dropping the Wi-Fi connection and then reconnecting on its own every few minutes, try updating to version 1.0.0.75, from this download page (scroll down to 1.0.0.75 and click "Download" at the bottom of the section.

It's not Mozilla Thunderbird, and it's certainly not Microsoft Outlook, and so I wanted to try it - a completely different desktop e-mail client for Windows, called Sylpheed. Here's how I found it:

Pros

Lightweight

Independently designed and produced

Available for "Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and other Unix-like systems"

Fast to retrieve mail

Easy to set up

Supports POP3 and IMAP incoming protocols

Cons

In the default setup:

Doesn't do HTML e-mails, only text

Sometimes some folders aren't ready to move messages into, i.e., a dotted border doesn't appear around them when you drag messages onto them.

I say ready because sometimes they become available after some time

I haven't encountered this problem in Thunderbird or Outlook

This is a very small one: Slightly lacking in the UI finesse of Thunderbird and Outlook

This is a big one: Filters are defined program-wide, not account-wide. So if I have two accounts, Rocky and Speedy, and get e-mail from, say, separate accounts on Twitter to each of them, when I define a filter for "Twitter" in Sylpheed, I can select a Twitter folder on either Rocky or Speedy to send it to.

So if the filter is defined on Speedy, if I run the "Twitter" filter on Rocky, it will move all Twitter messages from Rocky to Speedy! That's not good, and is a deal-breaker for me unfortunately.

So for now it's back to Thunderbird (since I don't have Microsoft Office).